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The plot is thickening and a showdown is looming at City Hall over a proposal for the city to pursue “divestment” and “adaptive reuse” of the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts.

Translation: The city is having second thoughts about a budget-trimming scheme to off-load the Sony Centre by selling it to a private buyer who could transform it from a theatre into something else. Presumably the city would collect some cash and would no longer have to subsidize the cost of operating it as a theatre.

That was the recommendation of the mayor’s task force (with Councillor Gary Crawford as chair) on the future of three civic-owned theatres. The other two are the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts downtown and the Toronto Centre for the Arts uptown.

But wouldn’t it be a reckless and foolish move to throw away one of the city’s cultural jewels for the sake of meagre budget trims, especially after spending $30 million just a few years ago to restore it and enable it to endure for another 50 years as a theatre celebrating Toronto’s cultural diversity?

The task force’s recommendations, revealed a few weeks ago, came up for debate on Monday at a meeting of Toronto City Council’s executive committee.

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Things got tense when Dan Brambilla, CEO of the Sony Centre, was grilled about his proposal — filed in response to a request for expressions of interest — to turn the theatre into a not-for-profit enterprise run by a private group of investors he organized. The goal was to secure the long-term future of the sleekly restored facility as a showcase for cultural diversity, while letting Toronto taxpayers off the hook for subsidizing it with about $1 million annually.

“It was a frustrating situation,” says Councillor Shelley Carroll. “It seemed like an HBO series, as if somehow this was some sort of scandalous affair. Brambilla was treated like the kind of character played by Steve Buscemi.”

After Councillor Michael Thompson asked Ron Forbes, chair of the Sony Centre board, whether Brambilla might be involved in a conflict of interest, the meeting segued into a two-hour in-camera discussion.

In the end, executive committee advised council to defer for four months the task force recommendation about unloading the Sony. Council was urged to request a complete audit of the Sony during the years 2006 to 2011. The committee also recommended the Sony board be asked to come up with a long-term business plan under which it could continue to operate as a city-owned theatre while substantially reducing or eliminating its subsidy.

Nevertheless, its future is still iffy.

“We’re very concerned with what has been going on at the Sony Centre,” Thompson said Tuesday.

The task force singled it out as the only one of three civic-owned theatres that could be expendable. The rationale: both the St. Lawrence Centre and the TCA should be protected, and continue to be municipally owned and operated because of their value in the not-for-profit community cultural sector.

The Sony, on the other hand, could be targeted for divestment given its focus on commercial entertainment, according to the task force.

But surely that is a highly questionable conclusion, given that commercial entertainment makes up a small part of the Sony offerings, in the hope of helping to offset losses on the majority of its shows aimed at serving the city’s diverse communities.

If the city were going to abandon the Sony Centre, it would not have made sense to spend $30 million to restore and upgrade it. The theatre reopened in 2010, 50 years after it was built. The $30 million came in the form of payment for air rights from the developers of the L Tower, soon to open next to the theatre..

According to Carroll, it was because of the chance to enhance the Sony Centre, which they consider the jewel of the neighbourhood, that residents of the St. Lawrence area accepted building the L Tower.

And since the city gets $30 million of economic impact in return for its relatively modest subsidy of $3 million for the three theatres it owns and operates, it makes no sense to dump it now.

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